“What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answers to this question are objectives. How will you go about achieving your desired results? The answer to this you can call strategy.” – William E. Rothschild.

The foundation of any crucial decision is essentially a competent strategy and an individual who formulates such strategy, thus plays a vital role. An efficient technology strategist creates, captures, and delivers business value by prolifically aligning the required technological aspects of the organization with the devised strategy. One such profuse technology strategist is Randy J. Jeter, the CEO and co-founder of RapidScale, a managed cloud services provider.

Randy has a people, process, and systems-based approach to business with a focus on company culture. His vision is to develop the first managed global application platform, deliver the best virtual desktop experience, and capitalize on the market shift of business applications via a custom business app store. He was a member of the Channel Partners Advisory Board from 2009-2010 and led strategic IT shared spend capital investment projects for Alaris Consulting now part of PwC.

Randy received a baseball scholarship, has held a personal training certification from International Sports Sciences Association, and received a bachelor’s degree in Organizational Management from Vanguard University.

The Making of a Strategist

Randy’s key experiences were working for a visionary CEO, Arunas Chesonis at PAETEC Communications, leading shared spend capital investment projects for PwC, and acquiring as well as building a successful carrier and IT consulting company, Premiere Worldwide. From those experiences I learned that knowledge is the key to success.

Oftentimes people want to be tech strategists, but lack the foundation and team to help achieve that target. Randy believes that a person might be able to foresee shifts that will happen in the marketplace, but it takes a team of great minds and a vision to build upon that and achieve true success.

According to Randy, a tech strategist must surround himself/herself with a motivated and talented team, and value each individual’s strengths and contributions. “We’ve built a great team at RapidScale, and it just keeps growing. I’m very proud of where we’re headed,” states Randy.

Randy leads the vision, strategy, and approach to providing the best partner and client experience in the managed cloud services space. RapidScale’s vision ties directly into being a global market-leading managed and hybrid managed cloud services provider.

Prior to co-founding RapidScale, he was a Sales Manager at PAETECCommunications and then acquired a channel consulting business doing strategy carrier services and IT projects for PwC. Throughout the path he has taken to this point, he has been in the weeds and truly understands the partners’ and clients’ needs. “When I see a partner or client concern, I pick up the phone and learn from the situation,” states Randy.

Reforming the Cloud Market

Emphasizing upon RapidScale’s distinctiveness in the market, Randy asserts, “We innovate and we automate. By combining our partners’ innovation and ours, we grow stronger.” The company’s distinctiveness is ascended a notch up by its delivery of managed and hybrid managed cloud approach to both the SMB and enterprise markets.

This includes a comprehensive suite of solutions, an integrated top-tier technology stack, and managed global cloud platform. RapidScale works directly with clients to establish their needs and the level of management and support they need from the company.

From a target audience perspective, its focus is 25 to 4000-user businesses. “We’re flexible, periodically going lower for certain business verticals and also seeing a lot of opportunities and wins with larger businesses,” says Randy.

“But when it comes to consistent wins, or a sweet spot, it’s those businesses with 25-4000 users and some common characteristics including limited IT resources, multiple locations, an IT team that supports lines of business, etc.,” he adds.

Ascending the Stairway of Progress

Answering the question of what RapidScale did to get where it is currently positioned, Randy asserts, “We fought like hell to build something with value, which is positioned well, without giving up the board or our primary equity position.”

RapidScale has a three-fold approach, build the best global application delivery platform, increase application revenue year over year by 100% and deliver the best client experience. “If we do these three things we can be a big part of the future of cloud services. I’m confident about that,” says Randy.

For RapidScale, it hasn’t been an easy task in the cloud space, but the two founders, Randy and COOWilliam Hiatt are committed. With hard work, sleepless nights and a committed workforce, it has made it through challenging periods, kept its clients, and has become a market leader in managed cloud services.

Guiding the Path Seekers

Randy advices the aspiring tech strategists to analyze past trends in similar markets and verticals, to engage great financial minds for Q&A related to market stability. But most importantly, by finding niches within the market approach one can laser focus on and execute on with a high probability of success.

Adding to the advice, he asks the future professionals to comprehend that none of this is easy, but great tech strategists are able to analyze the risk vs. reward and financial positioning of the company for both an up and down market trend.

The simplest observations are sometimes the greatest discoveries. Watching an apple…

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